Pour Decisions: Our Top Ten Drinks at Food & Wine 2025

Welcome to our new beverage rating system! We are proud to announce the TouringPlans Pour Decisions rating system that was created by our good pal, James Beauchamp, for use exclusively by the TouringPlans Festival Food and Bev team. Or anyone that hangs with us to eat and drink.

As you can guess from Meg’s notes and her scores, we won’t be recommending a stop in Belgium for the Chilled Belgian Coffee. That’s $12.50 you’re saving already!

The Pour Math

Because this is TouringPlans, there has to be a bit of math with the fun. We tried 59 alcoholic beverages on Thursday at the opening of EPCOT’s Food & Wine Festival and we ranked every single one. While we did have a full team with us at the Festival, we had two beverage leads who each completed a score sheet for every beverage as we moved around the park. The individual scores were tallied into a pretty nifty spreadsheet (thanks, Jim!) to give us our ranking.

You can see from the score sheet above, each drink was rated in 5 areas. Within each scoring category there are ratings of 1-5 with 1 being the lowest value and 5 as the highest value. Each rating value is worth a different number of points, depending on the category, to give some categories a bit more weight.

So, this point system places more value on the taste and smell of a drink than the look of the beverage. This is why a 4 in the Flavor and Aroma category carries more points than a perfect 5 in any other single area. A perfect 5 in every category gives a perfect 100 points.

The Pour Decisions Top Ten

It will cost you $121.20 to try all of our top ten picks. Here are our favorite beverages of Food & Wine and their Pour Scores:

This thick stout surprised our beverage testers who were not excited to try it at first. The verdict? One team loved this and rated it highly and the other team made some really fun faces and tanked the scores – just not enough to knock it out of 10th place. If you like a stout and are ready for fall vibes, we’d give it a try.

Both teams rated this 3’s across the board with the exception of one 4 in Presentation for a total of 124 points. The spice was more warm than hot.

Our #8 drink is small but mighty. One of the comments we got on this score sheet was “Sake Juice Box!”

Sure the score on this drink is high, and it was delicious, but the food was boring and this might make #7 not worth the effort. It should also be noted that one of our testing teams loved this drink and the other said the cocktail was the perfect pair to the airplane meal style of food being served here. We do not disagree with that assessment, but the numbers are the numbers. The biggest score gap for this drink was a 2 and a 4 for Presentation giving it 24 of 40 possible points.

Wait. Did our testers only like red drinks? We’re seeing a pattern here. This happy drink was universally loved and it wasn’t just because of the flower – although it did score 28 out of a possible 40 for Presentation! It also got one of the higher score combinations in the Contextual Fit category with 27 of 30 possible points.

Does anyone know what the color red says about you? This Comso got big points for Flavor & Aroma even though it suffered a bit in Presentation because it was missing the “Chilled” part of the name. This pretty drink got 48 of 60 possible points for Flavor & Aroma and only 24 of 40 points for Value. The issues with the drink machines all over the Festival were the same and we’re hoping it’s just first day bugs. Not much that was advertised as frozen or chilled was much beyond cold.

Clearly the judge from Ohio wasn’t bribed enough. Let it be known that this author believes this to be one of the best drinks to ever come out of Food & Wine. I both accept and am disheartened by the scores awarded to this beautiful bourbon delight. There wasn’t a single 5 from either of the beverage teams. How is that possible? Was the red food coloring affecting their judgement? That can be the only answer.

The most painful part of this score is the erroneous assessment of 42 points out of a possible 60 for Flavor & Aroma. Alas, we move on to our top 3.

Our 3rd place drink of Food & Wine scored well in every category except Value where it received 24 of 40 possible points. It may not have been a large serving, but everyone in our group was mostly soberish when we got to the kitchen in China and all agreed it was delightful.

157 points and it’s not red! We talked about this drink for hours after we left EPCOT. The ingredients look simple but they made a truly impressive Margarita as the scores show. We gave it 32 of 40 for Presentation, 48 of 60 for Flavor & Aroma, 21 of 30 for Creativity, 32 of 40 for Value, and 24 of 30 for Contextual Fit. Outstanding!

Winner, winner, cheese dinner. Yes, that’s sage. No, we don’t know why, but it works! Beautifully! If you only try one drink and one dish at one booth at all of Food & Wine, get the Greek Melon Limeade and the Griddled Cheese. Sneak off where your greedy spouse and kids won’t find you and enjoy this pair in peace. It was approximately 900 degrees Thursday in EPCOT with humidity of 99% or so. We were regretting life choices. Our score sheets were damp and our sunscreen was stinging our eyes and we were sick of looking for trash cans to eat on. And then Greece and the Greek Melon Limeade and Griddled Cheese happened and we all smiled and yammered on about how delightful it all was. No arguments here with this award.

What do you think of our new Pour Decisions rating system? Is there a category you’d like to add? Do you want to see something similar for food ratings during the Festival of the Holidays? Let us know!